During the May 2018 informal UN-REDD Executive Board (EB) meeting, progress on the development of the new UN-REDD’s Gender Marker rating system was shared and welcomed positively by the EB.

The UN-REDD Gender Marker, first introduced last year, is a rating system that measures, on a yearly basis, how, and to what degree, each of the outputs of the UN-REDD Technical Assistance (TA) programme contribute to achieving gender equality and the empowerment of women. And while the UN-REDD Gender Marker rating system seeks synergies with similar existing Gender Marker systems of UNDP, UN Environment and FAO, it specifically builds on its own good practices & lessons learned on gender and is tailored to be in alignment with the scope of 2018-2020 TA programme. It also serves as a pilot for UN inter-agency programmes in demonstrating how they can track and monitor gender.

The UN-REDD Gender Marker update, which was shared with the EB, highlighted the progress made in integrating the gender monitoring systems of the 3 UN-REDD agencies into a common methodology as well as in establishing a gender baseline for each of the 55 outputs under the TA programme.

This progress has included defining detailed criteria for each one of the Gender Marker ratings in order to allow UN-REDD to objectively, transparently and comparatively rate the gender-responsiveness of the outputs, both in terms of the baseline as well as for each year of the TA programme. Additionally, an initial baseline assessment, based on a document review, has been undertaken for each TA output and a corresponding gender marking rating has been assigned. While these baseline results still need to be verified with UN-REDD lead technical advisors, and are, therefore, subject to adjustments, the preliminary results reveal that all TA outputs have integrated gender into their baseline, although to varying degrees. So far, approximately one-fourth of the outputs meet all established criteria and fully integrate gender into their baseline. The remaining three-fourths have partially integrated gender and meet at least one of the criterion. Not a single output is gender blind. This baseline information helps UN-REDD to 1) monitor implementation to ensure gender mainstreaming efforts remain or improve; and 2) identify good practices and areas of improvement on gender within the TA programme.

As for next steps, these baseline results will be validated and finalized together with an Informational Note on the UN-REDD Gender Marker rating system with UN-REDD professionals, stakeholders and partners. The final versions of this Note and the baseline will be shared at the September 2018 EB Meeting, for formal adoption.

From 2018 onward, the Gender Marker will feed the monitoring, annual reports and miscellaneous evaluations of the UN-REDD TA programme. It will also be available as a model for other UN and international programmes.

Stay tuned for more updates on the UN-REDD Gender Marker.

Tags: Global FAO UNDP UNEP Gender Executive Board

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